by James Jones
Prew started, laughing, down the aisle, then turned back toward the Indian. “I sure guess them breakfast conversations are all through,” he said, and was suddenly embarrassed at what he should not have said.
“What?” Chief said, inexpressively. “Oh, them. Yeah, I guess they are.” He turned quickly, went on toward his bunk.
Chapter 8
THERE IS, IN THE Army, a little known but very important activity appropriately called Fatigue. Fatigue, in the Army, is the very necessary cleaning and repairing of the aftermath of living. Any man who ever owned a gun has known Fatigue, when, after fifteen minutes in the woods and perhaps three shots at an elusive squirrel, he has gone home to spend three-quarters of an hour cleaning up his piece so it will be ready next time he goes to the woods. Any woman who has ever cooked a luscious meal and ladled it out in plates upon the table has known Fatigue, when, after the glorious meal is eaten, she repairs to the kitchen to wash the congealed gravy from the plates and the slick grease from the cooking pots so they will be ready to be used this evening, dirtied, and so washed again. It is the knowledge of the unendingness and of the repetitious uselessness, the do it up so it can be done again, that makes Fatigue fatigue.
And any man who shoots his gun at squirrels and then gives it to his young son with orders to clean, any woman who cooks the succulent meal and gives the dishes to her non-cooking daughter to be washed—those grownups know the way an officer feels about Fatigue. The son and daughter can understand the way an enlisted man feels about Fatigue.
Fatigue, in the Army, occupies fifty percent of the duty time; in the morning there is drill, in the afternoon Fatigue; but it is a fifty percent unmentioned in the enlistment campaigns and the pretty posters outside every Post Office in the nation that are constantly extolling the romance of a soldier’s life, the chance for adventurous foreign travel (take the wife), the exceedingly high pay all unattached (if you get the rating), the chance to be a leader (if you get the commission), and the golden merits of learning a trade that will support you all your life. A recruit never finds out about Fatigue until some time after he has held up his right hand and then it is too late.
Most of the details are not too bad, they are only fatiguing. For there is the justification that they are necessary. If there is to be baseball, some one must spread the horse manure on the diamond so the infield will be grassy, and no one could expect that the players do it, since they do the playing.
Paper tissues have been invented to save the washing of snotty handkerchieves, but no one has yet invented a way to keep from scrubbing web equipment after a long march through the exotic pineapple fields of Old Hawaii. When some future Edison applies his genius to this problem and finds a way to free the human race, so proud of all its other freedoms, from this final slavery which the rich have relegated to the poor Romance (Long Live Romance) will be dead, war dominated, and Utopia and Armageddon come.
But in addition to the necessary details that are only fatiguing there are other details, in a Regiment of Infantry, that are not only fatiguing but degrading. It is hard to be Romantic about the cavalry when you have to curry your own horse, and it is hard to be Adventurous about the uniform when you have to polish your own boots. And this explains why officers, who are above such menial tasks, are capable of such exciting memoirs of war. A man may be bored with scrubbing his own cartridge belt after every sashay in the field but he is not disillusioned; but when he goes every afternoon to the Married Officers’ Quarters to manicure the lawns, wash the windows, sweep the yards, and clean the streets, he is not only disillusioned but degraded; he has really known Fatigue.
After every party at the Club there must be some loyal and patriotic soul who empties out the ashtrays and, holding his drooling tongue, wipes up the liquor that was spilled upon the dancefloor. But these were not all. There was an even greater test of patriotism. There was the trash collecting detail.
Once every twelve days in its rounds of the battalions this chance for heroism fell to every Company, and the three-man picked detail sortied out in their truck to collect the trash, as distinguished from garbage which the Kanaka garbage truck collected, from the Married Officers’ Quarters.
In itself this would not seem very patriotic; but the officers’ wives, having no incinerators, fearing to clog the soil pipes, and not wanting to use the garbage truck whose collector was a civilian and could quit, deposited their used menstruation pads in their trash cans. Emptying a single can so used can be very patriotic, but by the end of an afternoon when the truck was full the patriotism required of the detail was immense. They deserved at least a D.S.C. as, walking the two miles to the dump instead of riding in the back, knowing what their best friend would not tell them, they trudged doggedly through the aura of bad fish that clung to them all.
Even the insensitive stomachs of the most patriotic and most common soldiers, at that time uneducated in the stronger odors of the war, were inclined to rebel. And the most rebellious of those stomachs, since Warden ran the details for G Company, was invariably Prewitt’s.
It became increasingly clear, from day to day, that whenever Prew happened to be at the head of the double line of the Fatigue formation, Warden would happen to call out one of the more patriotic details.
One of these was the butcher shop detail. The butcher shop in addition to its market for the wives supplied the meat for all the individual companies. The butchers, enlisted men on Special Duty, did not mind the more delicate work of cutting steaks and chops, but they applied for Fatigue details to do the heavier slimier work of unloading and moving the sides around. Prew’s neat tailormade blue fatigues would be stiff with blood and muck after an afternoon of this. It would be on his face and in his ears and in his hair, and the rancid smell of the butcher shop would waft about him as he walked. Warden would be standing in the corridor doorway as he came in, his sleeves rolled up two turns, smoothly cool and clean after a refreshing shower, and grinning fondly.
“Better hurry up and wash,” he’d say. “Chow’s almost over. The Compny’s been in for fifteen minutes. Or maybe,” he would grin, “you’d rather go in like you are and wash up later.”
“No,” Prew would tell him seriously. “I think I’ll wash first.”
“Still the dude, ’ey?” Warden would grin at him. “Suit yourself.”
One day Warden asked him if he shouldnt maybe go out for fighting, or maybe baseball. “You look awful tard, kid,” he grinned. “If you was a jockstrap you wouldnt have to pull Fatigue.”
“What makes you think I mind it?”
“I didnt say you didnt like it, kid.” Warden said complacently. “All I said was you looked tard. Drawn to a fine edge.”
“If you think you can push me into fightin, Warden,” Prew told him grimly, “you are wrong. I can take everything you hand out. You and Dynamite together. I’m twice the man you are. If you didnt have them stripes, I’d take your big bulk out on the green and beat it to a pulp. And if I couldnt do it with my fists, I’d git me a knife and look you up downtown some night in River Street.”
“Dont let the stripes worry you, kid,” Warden grinned. “I can always take my shirt off. Take it off right now.”
“You’d like that, wouldnt you?” Prew grinned back. “You could get me a year in the Stockade for that one, couldnt you?” He turned to go upstairs.
“What makes you think Holmes has got anything to do with this, kid?” Warden called after him.
And there were other minor inconveniences. He had meant to use his first weekend in G Company to go to Haleiwa for the showdown with his shackjob, but all the first week he had been a victim of The Warden’s Duty Roster, as a new man, his name heading every list for extra details. And The Warden utilized his advantage relentlessly.
As the week went by and he did not see his name on any KP list, his soldier’s intuition began to whisper warnings. On Friday when the details for the weekend were posted on the bulletin board the suspicion became fact. Warden had saved
his KP back to give him on the weekend. But Warden was even cleverer than he had suspected. Prew was on KP Sunday, and on Saturday he was Room Orderly. There would not even be one day off to go to Haleiwa.
There was a diabolical finesse in this arrangement, too. A Saturday KP got out of standing Saturday Inspection, but the RO had to stand Inspection like everybody else, in addition to his extra work. Warden was a smart man, no doubt of that; when he held the cards nobody could beat him at the way he played the hand.
Early Saturday morning Warden came out of the Orderly Room, all spruced up for inspection, to watch Prewitt manicure the porch. He leaned against the doorjamb grinning lovingly, but Prew worked on grudgingly and ignored him. He occupied himself with wondering whether Holmes had engineered this deal because he would not fight, to force him into going out, or whether it was Warden’s own idea for some ungodly reason just because he did not like him.
Sunday Warden came into the kitchen for breakfast around eleven. He was the topkicker and he did not have to eat on schedule like the rest of them. Warden had hotcakes and eggs and sausage; the Company had had hotcakes and bacon, such as it was with Preem sleeping off a hard night in his sack. Warden leaned against the aluminum pastry table with its big utensil rack above it and ate his food with relish, in full view of the sweating KPs. Then he strolled over to the KP room past the huge built-in icebox.
“Well, well,” he said straight-faced, leaning leisurely against the jamb. “If it aint my young friend, Prewitt. How do you like straight duty, Prewitt. Life in a rifle company, ’ey.”
The cooks and other KPs were watching, because The Warden almost never spent a weekend on the Post. They were expecting something big.
“I like it, Top,” Prew grinned, trying to make the grin convincing, looking up from the steaming sink he was bent over, naked to the waist, his dungarees and shoes soaked with sweat and soapy water. “Thats why I transferred,” he said seriously. “Its a great life, this. I find a pearl, I’ll cut you in. Fifty-fifty. If it hadnt of been for you, I wouldnt of had no chance to find it.”
“Well, well,” The Warden said, laughing pleasantly. “Well, well. Thats a friend for you. Thats an honest man. Dynamite had his Preem and Galovitch in Bliss; I had my Prewitt in A Compny. When men have served together, they’ll do anything for each other. I’ll see if I can fix you up with a lot more, since you like it so much, Prewitt.”
He grinned down at the other, his brows hooked up his forehead. Prew always remembered it, later, as having been a look of secret understanding, a glance that swept the cooks, KPs and kitchen, everything aside, leaving only the two pairs of eyes that recognized each other.
He put his hand comfortably around a mug, heavy, handleless, at the bottom of the sink and waited for Warden to go on. But it was almost as if The Warden saw his hand around the mug beneath the water, for he grinned lovingly again and walked away, leaving Prew standing there absurdly with his daredevilish romantic picture of himself rising with the cup in murderous triumph.
But, in spite of Warden’s threat, his name did not come up on the Daily Details sheet again. His second weekend he was free to go to Haleiwa. It was the same curious fact he had noted so many times before, in A Company; Warden was scrupulously fair, in his own eccentric way, he never overstepped his own private, self-constructed line of equity.
He should, he knew, have written Violet a letter, once during the middle of the second week he even thought about it for a minute. But he did not do it. Letters, like long-distance phone calls, could never convince him of the existence of another human far away existing in this same present he existed in. In reality, Violet did not exist until he saw her, then she began again where she had left off before. In-between she existed only in his mind, and how can you write a letter to your own imagination?
He could remember, as a small boy, watching his mother write frequent long letters to different relatives and friends, some of whom he had never seen. It was his mother’s hobby, but even then it had seemed strange to him, in the town of Harlan Kentucky, to write letters to other towns, to people she had not seen for years and probably would never see again. While at any time his father might be caught in a cave-in in the mine and be dead before the answers came. After his mother died that winter of the strike, six letters had come addressed to her. He looked at her name on all the envelopes, the name of her who was already dead still existing on the paper, and then he opened them and read them curiously, and not a one of them had mentioned the fact that she had died. He had thrown them in the stove and burned them. There was a time lag there that seemed to exist in space instead of time, and he could never, after that, account for it.
So he did not write to Violet, because the writing of letters did not have a true connection with the realities of death, and moving on, and eating. He waited till he could get free and went to see her.
She was waiting for him at the door, leaning against the jamb and looking out through the screen, one hand propped against the other jamb as if barring the door to a salesman. It seemed to him that no matter what time of day or night he walked up the macadam road from the highway intersection, she was always waiting in that same position, as if he had just phoned and she was watching for him. It was uncanny, as if she always knew when he was coming. But it was no more strange than anything else connected with her.
He had never pretended to understand her since the first time he met her at Kahuku and took her to the carnival and, knowing carnivals which are the same in any portion of the earth, found that Violet was still a virgin. That in itself surprised him, and he did not get a chance to recover from it from then on.
Violet Ogure. Oh ǵoo-rdee. You pronounced the r like a drunken d. Even the name was strange and unpredictable. The strangeness of a foreign land is understandable, because you expect it when you go among foreigners, you’re even looking for it. But the equation of the simple first name and the alien-tongued surname was unreadable. Violet was like all the other second and third generation Japanese, Chinese, Hawaiian, Portagee, Filipino girls with their first names after English flowers and their last names coming across alien centuries, girls whose parents had been shipped in like cattle to work the cane and pineapple for the Big Five, girls whose sons were often among the numberless hordes of little boys shining your shoes on the sidewalk outside a bar, repeating the antique legend: “Me half Japanee, half Schofield,” or, grinning obliquely, “Me half Chinee, half Schofield.” A crop fathered by soldiers who had served their hitch and mysteriously vanished into that mythical “Mainland” that was the United States.
Violet was an ambivalent mingling of the intensely familiar and the inscrutably alien; she was like the city of Honolulu with its highpowered, missionary-owned bank buildings and its shanty Japanee-language movie just off Aala Park, a polygenetic blend nobody, least of all Violet, could encompass. He had learned to pronounce her name correctly, and that was all he learned about her.
He walked into the unkempt chicken-defiled front yard and she came out on the homemade leanto porch. He took her hand and helped her down the three rotting steps and they went around to the back, a ritual they repeated every time he came, because in the time he had been coming there he had never been invited or allowed in their front room.
The back porch was three times as large as the leanto on the front, unscreened, and with a network of vines from floor to roof that made it a secluded cave, almost another room, that was the living room of the Ogure family.
And behind the house was the chicken coop, a miniature of its shanty self, where conceited hens stalked complacently about peering beadily this way and that, crooning their smug song of the Sacred Vessel, and squirting their droppings in the grass with the righteousness of saints. The sour odor of their house and clan pervaded the whole place. And forever after the smell of chickens brought to Prew’s mind a vivid picture of Violet and of her life.
Her bedroom alongside the kitchen was perpetually cluttered. The covers on the peeling gilt iron be
d were always rumpled, and clothes were always draped across the bedfoot and the single chair. There was spilled powder on the homemade dresser, but in one corner there was a closet, made of two by fours for frame and hung with a lushly green and riotously flowered material made especially for Hawaii. Violet had fixed it up herself, to carry all the heavy hope of someday something better.
Prew stripped off his gook shirt and slacks and, naked, hunted through the clutter for his trunks, moving with the ease of long association. The clutter did not bother him; kicking shoes aside and tossing clothes from chair to bed, he was more at home in this flimsy shack than Violet was.
The cluster of shacks, growing up the hills on both sides of the road, might have been his home in Harlan, except for the absence of the soot and coaldust. The back porch with its rusty pump, the chipped sink with its zinc pail and granite dipper, it all was of the fabric of his life, and he moved through the thick air of this poverty with the ease that only a man who has been intimate with it can have.
And as he hunted tor the trunks he told her all about the transfer, why he had been so long in coming.
“Why did you transfer, though, Bobbie?” Violet asked him in the clipped twittering voice that always made him chuckle. She sat on the bed and watched him exchange his shoes and socks for the old canvas fishing sneaks.
The bright air slipped in from the outside through the single window that was like an afterthought, and it washed against the dimness and the funky smell of stale bedclothes. It touched his body coolly and he looked at Violet in her shorts and halter, feeling the old wild surge harden his belly and bring sweat to his palms.
“What?” he said vacantly. “Oh. I didn’t transfer. I was transferred. It was Houston did it, because I spoke my piece.
“Listen,” he said. “Theres nobody home. Lets you and me take one?” Three weeks, feeling the blood behind his eyes, almost a month, it was too long to wait.